Ron Paul: Government Is a Reflection of the People

Transcript

Ron Paul: Thank you very much, thank you. It’s a delight to be here tonight, I can’t imagine people staying up this late to listen to politicians, believe me. But… it’s great to be here and it’s a great theme tonight, talking about freedom and faith. I cannot imagine that any two more important issues of that because I frequently will say throughout my campaigning and rallies that we’ve had, that the goal of all political activity is liberty and what is the purpose of having this liberty? Well the purpose of liberty as far as I’m concerned is to allow creative energy to be released for us to then seek virtue and excellence because governments can’t provide virtue and excellence, you have to have a free society so we as individuals can assume that responsibility.

Life is precious, I’m an OB doctor, I’ve delivered over 4,000 babies and there are some of my friends who take a different position on the life issue and they claim that the mother, you’ve heard all the arguments that mother’s life is precious, you can’t interfere with her and her body. But as an OB doctor, let me tell you life does begin at conception. And also it’s very legal, if I as a physician do something wrong and injure the fetus, I can rightfully be sued because of the rights if the fetus. If the fetus is injured in an accident or a homicide, there is a homicide because of the fetus being killed. So there is no doubt in my mind about the respect that we should have for life.

Why is this so important? Well, for most of us we respect liberty and freedom, that’s what we are engaged in, is protecting freedom. So if we do not have high respect for life, how can we be dealing with our personal freedom or personal privacy, our rights to home school our kids and the right to pick our religion and make personal choices on what we do. It would be impossible if you don’t have high regards and respect for life and then respect for liberty, because without liberty, we do not have what has made this country so great.

We live in difficult times today because I think there’s been a total rejection of some of these basic principles that have made America great. I was in the military during the 1960s I was in the Air Force for 5 years, but the 1960s were rough times, we were engaged in, unfortunately an undeclared war and it was tragic in the sense of life lost, but cultural changes were occurring and that is when abortion became common place. So the people changed before the laws changed, so morality has a lot to do with legislation, we don’t have abortions today because the law permits it, that’s made it worse but the law accommodated the social changes that occurred, it was the breakdown of our social system at that time.

The war had something to do with it, the drug culture had something to do with it and of course this move toward making life so careless and accepting the notion of abortion. But during this period of time, there was a rejection of the family as well. It started off, then statistics came out and they started to show that minorities were having more babies out of wedlock. But now it’s cultural, I mean it is getting to be an epidemic that the family values and the families have broken down and this is where our real problems come from. We would like to think all we have to do is elect the right politicians and everything is going to be okay, but believe me, the government is a reflection of the people, that’s why the burden is on people like you to make sure that we have those values.

But the family is something that’s very important, it’s engrained in our Christian heritage, in the Constitution, one of the provisions that I site that most frequently is article 1, section 8, because that tells you everything we’re allowed to do. The rest of the things we’re not allowed to do in the 9th and 10th Amendment of course confirms [apple e]. But there’s a Biblical passage in the Old Testament, it’s 1st Samuel Chapter 8, so I remember that, 1st Samuel and chapter 8. Now that is the provision, I am sure that you have heard of it before because this is when after the Israelites came out of Egypt, they had accepted God as their King, and that’s where they live by, they did not have a King, what they had were Judges. It was a patriarchal society, it was a family driven society. But there were always going to be arguments and conflicts, so these conflicts were taken not to the government but to somebody that was chosen to be a Judge and a respected person that respected the law and respected their traditions.

But a time came, there was always temptation even as Israelites were leaving Egypt that there was the temptation to drift away from the belief in God. But there was this effort made under Samuel, the people came and said “We want somebody to take care of us, we want a King.” And Samuel strongly objected to it, he explained to them “You do not want a King that will substitute for God” and he predicts in this, you need to read that chapter because he predicts what happens if you have a King. He said “The King will take your young people, your young men to fight war, the young women to be used in the government, they’re going to tax you and they’re going to overburden you and you will have to work so much time like 25, 35, 45% of the time for the King.”

And I got to thinking, it was astute wisdom and astute advice, but isn’t that essentially what we have done today? I don’t think we need a King and we don’t need Washington to act as if they’re the King in this country… But today, there is so much dependency, dependency on the government and it’s cradle to grave and we have so little confidence in ourselves, we believe that if we don’t have the safety net and we don’t have the government there, if we don’t have Medical Care taken care of, if we don’t have the government schools, everything would fall apart. We have, as a people, lost our confidence in understanding of what true liberty is all about where it comes from. And it doesn’t come from our King, it doesn’t come from our government, our liberties come from our creator, that’s where our life and liberty comes from.

But it was advised by the founders at the time that the constitution would not work if we did not remain a moral society and we’re at the crossroads right now because we have lived beyond our means, we have become totally dependent, we do all the things that we shouldn’t do and don’t do the things we should do. What are we doing, just take for instance our foreign policy, when is the last time we declared war? When is the last time we won a war? Outright, it’s been a long time ago. We do need, in the constitution, a strong national defense, we should have a strong national defense and we’re allowed to defend ourselves, but the obligation is to be the Congress through the people, when we have an enemy that we have to go after, we should declare the war and win the war and not have these perpetual wars and allowing our president to go into places like Libya without even telling us about it.

But, faith and freedom is a crucial item, we must have the faith that generates an understanding of what true liberty is about. But we also have to have confidence and an understanding about the proper foreign policy, a constitutional foreign policy, but an understanding of free market economics, what about a Biblical understanding about what honest money is about, what about honest weights and measures and no paper currency and no Federal Reserve that destroys our currency. There’s nothing moral about our financial system and our monetary system. And this recent breakdown of our system is proved positive of it, because it was predictable that there was a bubble out there, many predicted that it would come and it would burst, and it did. But guess what? Washington panicked and they said “The end of the world is coming, so what we must do is we must tax the people and spend more money and borrow more money and print more money and that’s going to get us out of trouble.”

But they didn’t ask “How did we get into this trouble?” “Well we spent too much, we borrowed too much, we regulate too much and we printed too much” and they thought that was going to help. But it doesn’t work that way, honest money means that you can counterfeit money. There’s a good little booklet called ‘The Law’ by Bastiat and he teaches a principle that you as an individual, or the government can’t do anything that you as an individual can’t do. But you’re not allowed to counterfeit, why do we allow the government to counterfeit, that’s why government is so big, they don’t have to be responsible and we don’t need to raise the national debt so that they are just encouraged to spend more money.

But they should not be allowed to just print the money because it is immoral and it is the encouragement for big government, there’s hasn’t been a war fought in the many centuries without debasing the currency. Since the crash of 2008, our dollar actually has been devalued 50% against gold, so therefore lookout for trouble and the odds of us cutting back over in the hill and live sensibly, aren’t very good. So we are going to be challenged, we’re going to be challenged because we’ll not be able to depend on our King, the King’s time has run out and guess who you’re going to have to depend on? You’re going to have to depend on yourself, your family, your friends, your neighbors and your Church to be prepared.

It will be challenging, there is no doubt about it, but the reason why we should be optimistic about this is we have great traditions, we know something about sound money, private property, contract rights and it’s not quite like the kind of problems that the Soviet System met, but we will. We’re over extended internationally, we cannot be the peacemaker of the world, we cannot be nation building because we don’t have the money. I at times when I think about what we need to do, everybody that wants to tell you what to do, you’ll have to sacrifice. But you know what? I don’t tell the people I talk to that “It’s up to you,” that you have to sacrifice, you might have to go to work and take care of yourself, but what would be like if you had less regulation and no income tax and sound money? That’s not a sacrifice that means you could take care of yourself a lot easier.

The people that ought to be sacrificing are the people who ripped us off in building up of the bubble and then we went and bailed them out and they’re making big bucks again and we don’t, and the people who are suffering is the middleclass, they lost their jobs, they lost their mortgage, they lost their houses, a moral society would not let that happen, we need to believe once again in the principles of liberty, we need to understand why the family is the bedrock, the educational system should be through the family and the Church, we should be promoting home schooling and private schooling and not depending on our public school system.

But the good news is I have been speaking out a lot in the last couple of years especially round the country and with a lot of young people and I spot a lot of young people here. The burden is falling on the young people, but it’s not the next generation, it’s this generation, it’s right here today, so we have to deal with our problem. But there’s a lot of enthusiasm for the renewal of the concept of personal liberty and the concept of our constitution and those things that have made America great, and I thank you very much. Thank you.

(If you’ve found a spelling or transcription error, please notify us anonymously by selecting the misspelled text and then pressing Ctrl+Enter. Thank you!)

12:58 pm: "Actually, no. If you look at what caused the 2007 Economic Crisis it was not caused by the Federal Reserve nor by its monetary policies." - SnowBoarder SLC

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